Tibetan Buddhist Nun Refugee - Rougpo

Ani Gyaltsen Choedon (Rougpo) is a Tibetan refugee I just began to sponsor through the Rime Buddhist Center & Institute of Tibetan Studies.  (The Rime Center Facebook page.)

Rougpo is a Buddhist nun and so beautiful! The refugees are those in exile from Tibet with no family to care for them in India and Nepal. The money goes 100% to the refugee and helps pay for their food, clothing, studies, etc. It's a pretty amazing thing to make such a huge and direct impact to someone else's life.

Every day Tibetans risk their lives by walking across the Himalayas simply for religious freedom. Refugees who make it to India or Nepal have few if any job skills and they live in abject poverty. It hits me hard that we so easily forget how fortunate we are to have religious freedom in the U.S. To practice whatever we believe. We don't have to leave everything in our lives, walk over the highest mountains in the world, and enter a life of abject poverty where your life can literally depend upon another human halfway around the world. Very humbling.